Udder shots

I am (temporarily) posting some udder photos for illustration purposes for a Backwoods Home Magazine dairy article I just submitted. These photos are so the editor can select which ones she prefers.

Photo 420 - Jersey/Dexter cross, three years old, second calving, recently freshened. Note the even floor (all four teats same length) and tight udder attachment.

Photo 438 - Same Jersey/Dexter cross as in Photo 20.

Photo 439 - Jersey/Dexter cross nursing her calf.

Photo 428 - Purebred Jersey heifer, 2.5 years old, nearly ready to have her first calf. Tight udder attachment, even floor.

Photo 431 - Same purebred Jersey heifer shown in Photo 428.

Photo from 2/10/11 - Purebred Jersey cow, approximately eight years old, sixth calf. Note the massive and pendulous udder with stretched ligaments and poor udder attachment.

Photo 480 - Purebred Jersey cow, approximately ten years old. Note the pendulous udder with stretched ligaments and poor attachment.

Some bovine basics

Some time ago, a reader named Kari left a comment (copied below) with some basic bovine questions. I started to answer and then got sidetracked with a zillion other things. Kari, please forgive my tardiness!
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I'm a first time commenter, but long-time reader. We have very little in common -- polar opposites, politically, socially and parentally, as it may be -- but I've long been interested in homesteading and home-business-ing (already got the homeschooling part down) and so greatly admire your commentary and knowledge on the subject. I found your blog some time ago through Backwoods Home Magazine, your Bovine Basics article. Your blog has been a huge inspiration, source of entertainment (and delicious recipes), and the seed of many far-fetched plans and ideas for the until-recently unrealised dream of having my own land and homesteading. I recently became the owner of two parcels, and it's all starting to become real now. The larger parcel away from the "home" parcel has been run for about 20 years as an organic pick-your-own operation and farm stand, and I'm learning the trade on a crash-course before summer. But as for my main parcel, about 40 acres, I'm starting out blank slate and am going to work setting it up as a true, diverse homestead and moving/crawling toward self-sufficiency.

Your blog has been a huge resource for me, and I greatly admire your family for how you've survived and thrived after you too made the big leap of faith moving from the city to the country. I probably never would have even dared to start without the writings of yourself and others like you who've done it and succeeded, so from the bottom of my heart, I just wanted to say, thank you!

I also have a probably silly question, if you don't mind humouring a completely naive Bovine Beginner:

When you've gotten cows in the past from other people, what do you look for? Do you bring a vet to check them out like you would a horse, or is there a set of either vague or specific criteria you go in knowing and looking for?

By the way, I admit I sometimes check your blog several times a day, just looking for a Lydia fix! My kids too. Shouldn't have shown them; since being "introduced" to Lydia, they've been begging for a Pyrenees for several months now.

Thank you very much for the insight and entertainment of your blog, and I'm sorry I've made a yawner of this!
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Kari, I’m delighted to have you as a reader! Especially if our political and social philosophies differ as much as you say, then your compliments are praise indeed. Thank you so much!

I am thrilled on your behalf that you’re the proud owner of two parcels of land. Whoo-hoo! How cool is that? Please be sure to keep us posted about your progress. I’m serious about that.

To answer your Beginning Bovine questions:

When buying your first cow, it will depend on where you find her. We got Matilda (our mature Jersey) off a commercial dairy herd. We had no options about getting a healthy four-quartered cow; the dairy naturally wouldn’t sell those (at least at a price we could afford). We had our choice (sight unseen) of a number of culls. We ended up with Matilda, whom I love dearly, but she’s had a number of udder problems I wouldn’t wish on anyone, notably a nightmare case of mastitis which eventually killed one of her quarters. (She's healthy in all other respects, however; and she is a wonderful surrogate mom to all calves, so she's a valuable addition to our farm.)

It’s also a dicey thing to purchase a mature cow through Craig’s List or the Pennysaver or some other method, because these animals are usually culls sold through a broker. Not always, but often. The advantage with this situation, however, is you can at least bring a vet or a knowledgeable friend along to inspect the animal prior to purchase.

Naturally you can find healthy mature four-quartered cows for sale, but you’ll pay a premium price. Our neighbors bought such an animal, and she’s never given them a lick of trouble health-wise. So if you can afford it, go for those but expect to pay around $2000 - $2500. We got Matilda for $500. Frankly we got what we paid for.  So did our neighbor.

An alternative to a mature cow is to find a healthy Jersey calf. We were blessed to find Polly through Craig’s List. She was being sold by a homeschooling family who had raised her with love and had already lead-trained her quite nicely. The mother cow was on site so I could check out her udder attachment. Altogether we feel we got a bargain with Polly – but of course we’ll have to wait until she’s 15 months old before we can breed her, then wait another nine months after that for her to calve and we can start milking. So when buying a calf, your milking days are a couple years away.

What criteria should you look for in a cow?

One, I would look for a dehorned animal. Horns can be trouble. Polly wasn’t dehorned. She’s still young enough that we could manually dehorned her, but that’s a painful nightmare for the animal (and not so spiffy for us either) so we’ve decided to just leave her horned. It’s a calculated risk we’re willing to take. But for a bovine beginner, I would recommend a dehorned or polled (genetically hornless) animal.

Two, she should be friendly. Some cows have never been handled and can be quite wild. These can be tamed, of course, but you’ll have to confine her in a small corral or barn while you do this. It takes patience and patience and more patience, but it will work if you’re patient. I have a friend who recently got her first cow. The cow was skittish, but because my friend was patient and gentle, the cow is coming along nicely.

A mature cow which has been milked before has an advantage here – she’s used to being handled and all you have to do is get her used to you. A younger animal can be more challenging. Daily gentle handling is important – brushing, feeding treats (such as a bit of grain), walking on a lead, etc.

Three, udder. Specifically, udder attachment. Since getting Matilda, I’ve learned far more than I ever wanted to about the drawbacks of a pendulous, poorly attached udder.

A pendulous udder will only become more pendulous as the animal ages. The udder may get so long and stretched that the cow will actually step on her own teats (OUCH). When it gets that bad, it’s better to put the animal down. Matilda is probably on this path, sad to say, though we have a few more years before it’s that bad.

But a well-attached udder should stay well attached for the lifetime of the cow. This type of udder is high and tight against the cow’s body, rather than hanging down like a sack.

This is our neighbor's Jersey. When I took this photo a couple weeks ago, she was "bagged up," meaning her udder is swelling shortly before giving birth. (She has since given birth to a little bull calf.) Notice how high and tight her udder is against her body.

Now contrast this with Matilda's poor udder attachment, keeping in mind that Matilda's calf is three months old, so she is no longer "bagged up" and turgid. Still, you can see how saggy-baggy her udder is.  (That's a calf's rump on the ground underneath her.)

A rear view (sorry it's blurry) showing the loose ligatures holding Matilda's bag.

Odd as it may sound, purchasing a three-quartered cow may not be a bad thing. Sometimes a cow can lose a teat from frostbite or another condition that may not necessarily affect the other teats. (Find out the truth about why the teat died.  If it was mastitis, beware; for many cows it's a chronic condition.)  Many three-teated cows become wonderful family milkers. So don’t necessarily let a dead quarter decide you against a cow, if she fits all the other criteria.

I posted a little more about udders here.

Hope this helps! I hope you find a suitable animal to bring onto your new farm.  As I said, please keep us posted.

Bovine updates

Thor is much better today! His scours has decreased and he's prancing around like... well, like a newborn.

He got brave enough to leave his pen for the first time too, but not at first. I had to clean the pen around him because he wouldn't go out...

...even when Matilda encouraged him.

But once outside, there was no stopping him. He gamboled about and explored and napped and acted like he was never scared to go outside.

Nothing new on the magic disappearing teat, however. We got three large syringes...

...and cut the tip off one of them. We sanded and filed the edges smooth.

What does a magic disappearing teat look like? Well as you can imagine it's pretty hard to photograph, but I tried. Here I held the camera underneath and got this shot:

The teat is just left of center top.

Here's another blind under-the-udder shot:

The teat is the little whitish bump on the extreme left. As of this posting, we haven't tried the syringe suction yet. I'll report what happens when we try it.

Milking questions

A reader sent the following email which I'm posting for everyone's benefit:

I am writing about milking cows. We live on 12 acres is East Texas. We moved here about a year ago. I always said I would never milk anything, but things change. I have Nubian milk goats and I am just not satisfied. Milking two gets me less than three quarts a day. You can not easily separate it and my husband thinks the cheese tastes goaty. I agree on the soft cheese. So my question for you is do you milk once or twice a day? If you milk once a day, how do you get to that point with the calf? How long til you can separate the calf from the mom for the night? Cows are much larger than goats, hence I didn't get one to start with. A little nervous. But I really like making cheese. Excellent article in Backwoods Home Magazine on cheese making by the way. So I think I am going to need to upgrade to a cow. Also any suggestions on buying one? Should I go to a dairy or buy one from someone on Craigslist?

My reply:

Regarding milk cows: I think it depends on what breed you get. For years and years we had only Dexters, which are a small dual-purpose (milk and meat) breed and I milked two cows. But then our neighbor got a Jersey and I fell in love with the breed, so we got Matilda. With the Dexters, because their milk output is not huge, I felt comfortable milking just once a day (I'd separate the calf at night and milk in the morning). But when we got Matilda and since she came off a commercial dairy, she had no calf on her and I was forced into a twice-a-day milking schedule. The rewards were tremendous - huge amounts of creamy milk, so I made butter and cheese like mad - but the schedule was rather unforgiving. It's not like I could skip a milking, after all, or the poor girl would burst.

But an interesting thing happened after Matilda had her calf last year - the calf took a lot of the cream and a lot of the milk, and though I was still milking twice a day, her output was FAR less (actually, this was a blessing - who needs five gallons of milk a day?). So I dropped to milking once a day (evenings) and that worked fine. Then as Matilda adjusted her output, I actually got lazy and stopped milking altogether. (Frankly it was a nice break.) I certainly could have continued milking but as I said, I just got lazy.

So to answer your question, a lot will depend on whether you get a heavy milk-producing breed or not, and whether you keep a calf on the cow or not. A cow will adjust her milk production to the demand. If both you and a calf are taking milk, she'll adjust her output higher. If you forego milking and just leave the calf on her, she'll adjust to that.

Frankly I like the once-a-day schedule and sharing the cow with her calf. I think it's healthier for the calf to be raised by its mama (and I think it's beneficial for a cow to raise her own calf), and a once-a-day schedule means you're not a slave to your cow. You can occasionally skip a milking by keeping the calf with the mother at night, for instance.

I like to keep a calf exclusively on the mother for two weeks. This bonds the animals and insures the calf gets all the colostrum it needs. Then if you plan to separate the calf at night, make sure you do so in such a way that the animals can still see and smell each other, such as a pen for the calf. If you just spirit the calf away at night and the mother has no idea where her baby has gone, she'll break the barn down in a frantic effort to find her calf. But if they can see/smell each other but are just physically unable to touch, there will be a lot of loud complaining but at least the cow knows where her baby is. It takes about two or three weeks for them to stop complaining and get used to the idea of being apart at night.

If I were to recommend a breed to a new milker, I would recommend a hand-raised Jersey. Dexters are a more spirited breed and may be a difficult adjustment, but if you're familiar with handling cows they're a fine breed to get. If you get a Jersey - and if we could do it all over again and if we had more money - I would get a healthy four-quarter cow (meaning, all of her udder quarters are working) with NO history of mastitis. You'll pay more but we had a nightmare case of mastitis when we got Matilda and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Since getting Matilda I've learned a great deal about udder attachment. Matilda has a terrible udder attachment but our neighbor's Jersey has a superb udder attachment. When looking over a potential animal, see if you can bring along someone who is knowledgeable about such things to help guide you. Commercial dairies tend to sell off their lower-quality cows. Be careful with a Craigslist listing, as you don't want to pick up a sick animal that someone is disguising as healthy. With a cow, you really do get what you paid for. We paid $500 for Matilda and, while I love her to pieces, that's all she was worth. Our neighbors paid about $2000 for their Jersey, and she is a far higher quality animal. Ah well, live and learn.

Dexter cow - excellent udder attachment

Dexter cow - poor udder attachment

Dexter cow - poor udder attachment - see how saggy-baggy she is.

With udders, a poor attachment looks "saggy baggy." A good udder attachment means the udder is held tight and close to the body. Ideally teats should be not misshapen and not poking out in all directions.

Dexter cow - excellent teats - all uniform.

Dexter cow - misshapen teats (harder to hand-milk)

Hope this helps! If you don't mind, I'm going to post your question and my answer on the blog so everyone can see it.